The cover of Badfinger’s third album, Straight
Up, shows a quartet of scruffy young dudes, all in earth tones, slung
arm in arm across a washed out brown background, giving the feel of a turn-of-the-century
sepia-tone daguerreotype hanging on a saloon wall. The image is all the more
striking for the absence of any names, titles, any words at all. It could
be a lost Beatles record sometime after Let it Be...

New Mexico, "Land of Enchantment,"
one of the few state nicknames I wholeheartedly agree with. Sure, Minnesota
has a lot of lakes, and Florida has a lot of sunshine, but New Mexico has
a lot of enchantment, something intangible and ephemeral. It's a beautiful
place where I've had few but memorable adventures, most recently getting trapped
in Albuquerque during a blizzard...